1. Rebecca has chosen a strategy of product differentiation with high-quality goods and service. Using this strategy, develop a strategy map. As you prepare the strategy map, be sure to consider the cause-and-effect relationships between various aspects of the business. For each balanced scorecard perspective, explain why you believe the strategic goals you list are important to the success of Rebecca's store.

Details: Quality plays a significant role in how customers view products and services provided at Rebecca's Coffee and Tea house. Customers at Rebecca's Coffee and Tea House, value quality in numerous ways: a relaxed atmosphere in the coffee house, high-quality homemade food and pastries, certified organic organic coffee, speedy service, and a personal, unique in-store experience. To effectively achieve the goal of high quality products and services, Rebecca must implement various prevention and appraisal activities. A prevention method which should be implemented to prevent quality issues from occurring is using only certified organic coffee from reputable vendors and suppliers. Another prevention method is that Rebecca should properly cross-train her employees so that they can perform various jobs (i.e. preparing food and drinks, grinding and brewing coffee, serving food, cleaning, etc) to help around the store. In addition, Rebecca should implement appraisal activities to identify quality issues prior to reaching a customer. Appraisal activities that Rebecca should use are testing coffee beans from producers to ensure they are of high-quality, investing monies into quality control procedures to ensure high-quality product and service, randomly testing prepared food to ensure it is prepared to high-customer standards, and implementing secret shoppers to make sure that employees are providing timely and personalized customer service with fresh food and coffee. Using prevention and appraisal activities will keep internal and external failure costs low and will prevent quality issues from occurring.

The costs of her business include operating costs, payroll costs and food costs. The operating costs would include everything needed to make the business run on a daily basis - electricity, water, and the various equipment she uses to make the food. The payroll costs would include any money paid to the employees in the form of salaries or bonuses. The food costs are how much she pays the producers for the ingredients of the different food items she sells. Prevention costs include buying higher quality ingredients to prevent contamination or bad taste and training employees to be more efficient workers. Appraisal activities and failure costs could result from not making the order right the first time, or accumulating high amounts of waste. This could result in the loss of customers and the reputation of bad service. Therefore, the prevention costs are necessary to prevent those appraisal and failure costs from occurring.